in the LITVAK COMMUNITY
9 March 2010
Dr Yitzhak Arad won a National Jewish Book Award for his new 700 page volume, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (University of Nebraska Press). The award was presented at the Center for Jewish History in New York on 9 March. Dr Arad, a Holocaust survivor whose family perished, is a veteran of the heroic anti-Nazi partisan resistance in the forests of Lithuania, and the Israeli War of Independence. A retired brigadier general and chief education officer of the Israeli Army, he served as director of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for 21 years. He lives near Tel Aviv.
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1 February 2010
Dr Efraim Zuroff, founding director of the Israel Office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, has been awarded the Order of Prince Trpimir with Ribbon and Star, by Croatian president Stjepan Mesić. The president’s signed certificate cites Dr Zuroff’s ‘outstanding contribution to the fight against historical revisionism and reassertion of the anti-fascist foundation of the modern-day Republic of Croatia and to establishment of good relations between the Republic of Croatia and the State of Israel’. The award was presented at midday on Monday 1 February 2010 in the palace of the president of Croatia in Zagreb. Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, was also honored by the Croatian president. Associated Press report here. FULL TEXT of Dr Zuroff’s acceptance speech here.
At the presidential palace in Zagreb on 1 February 2010.
Dr Zuroff is also celebrating the publication of his new book, Operation Last Chance: One Man’s Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, see Recent Books → 2009).
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27 January 2010
Hebrew University’s Professor Dov Levin, Kovno (Kaunas) Ghetto Holocaust survivor, veteran of the anti-Nazi partisans in Lithuania, and pioneer of both Litvak Studies and Holocaust Studies, was given an award, on the occasion of his 85th birthday, by Western Galilee College’s Holocaust Studies Program for ‘pioneering work in research on the Holocaust’. Among his dozens of works are encyclopedias of the Jewish history of Lithuanian towns, of Latvian and Estonian locations, and The Litvaks. A Short History of the Jews in Lithuania (details here). Tribute by Yossi Melman.
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28 October 2009
Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Brancovskaja), librarian of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit by the president of Germany. The medal and certificate were presented by Germany’s ambassador to Lithuania, HE Hans-Peter Annen, at a ceremony in the German Embassy. Born in 1922, Fania continues energetically to take students and visitors from every part of the world on tours of the old city (where she grew up), of the Vilna Ghetto (where she was incarcerated for two years with her parents and sister, who did not survive), and of the one remaining anti-Nazi Jewish partisan fort in the forest (where she lived underground while fighting with the resistance, in the winter of 1943-44 and through to liberation in July of 1944). Last summer, when authorities nixed the partisan fort part of the program, a group of students together with Fania organized a private bus and went just the same. In the spirit of Fania…
♦7 June 2009
Professor Leonidas Donskis was elected in Lithuania as a member of the European Parliament, running on the Liberal Party ticket. Born in Klaipeda in 1962, he has been for years professor at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, and dean of its Faculty of Political Science and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous seminal books on philosophy, political science and the history of ideas. His works have been translated into a dozen languages, and he has been a visiting professor in Britain, Sweden, the United States, and other countries. His unique television discussion show Without Anger (in Lithuanian) won a large following and promoted tolerance and openness. In recent years, Prof. Donskis has spoken out with inspirational courage and with unmatched sophistication, against the wave of antisemitism, Holocaust Obfuscation and ‘Double Genocide’ misinformation in his country (see for example here, here, and here).
After the election of Professor Donskis to the European Parliament, Peter Lang brought out a new volume which he conceived and edited, A Litmus Test Case of Modernity. Examining Modern Sensibilities and the Public Domain in the Baltic States at the Turn of the Century (= Interdisciplinary Studies on Central and Eastern Europe V). Peter Lang: Bern et al 2009. Information here.